“Of course there are two sides to the situation. (As Fred Zeleny pointed out, there are probably more…”
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Of course there are two sides to the situation. (As Fred Zeleny pointed out, there are probably more like five.) And I’ve read Ralph Koster’s AMA (which gives key insight into the average GamerGater’s perspective). But one of those sides is sending death and rape threats to women in game dev, and that is flatly unacceptable.
To be clear: I don’t think every person calling themselves part of GamerGate is evil. I think a lot of you probably do care about games journalism, and while I think you’re misguided, that doesn’t mean you’re all monsters.
But as long as you use the term “I’m part of GamerGate” to mean “I want better ethics in video game journalism”, then you are choosing to stand under the same umbrella as the people who use the term “I’m part of GamerGate” to mean “I will harass female game devs into quitting the industry”.
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“”Another game developer has left her home tonight because she fears for her life. Brianna Wu,…”
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“Another game developer has left her home tonight because she fears for her life.
Brianna Wu, developer of sci-fi action puzzler Revolution 60, confirmed that she and her husband have left their home due to a credible threat on Twitter. An account spammed Wu with violent threats and made it clear that it was doing so because of her outspoken support of women in tech and gaming. The last tweet publicly published Wu’s home address.”
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Understanding the Jargon of Gamergate
Understanding the Jargon of Gamergate:
The memetic terms Gamergate’s supporters love to repeat, explained.
“And that’s where the problem lies. We’re still behaving like the rebel alliance, but now we’re the…”
“And that’s where the problem lies. We’re still behaving like the rebel alliance, but now we’re the Empire. We got where we are by ignoring outsiders and believing in ourselves even when nobody else would. The decades have proved that our way was largely right and the critics were wrong, so our habit of not listening has become deeply entrenched. It even became a bit of a bonding ritual to attack critics of the culture because they usually didn’t understand what we were doing beyond a surface level. It didn’t used to matter because nobody except a handful of forum readers would see the rants. The same reflex becomes a massive problem now that nerds wield real power. GamerGate made me ashamed to be a gamer, but the scary thing is that the underlying behavior of attacking critics felt like something I’d always seen in our culture, and tolerated. It only shocked me when it was scaled up so massively into rape and death threats, and I saw mainstream corporations like Intel folding in the face of the pressure we can bring to bear.”